The Brooklyn Rail

There is a lot happening at the Warehouse in Dallas: candles burn a pair of sherbert figures at an agonizing pace, a giant asparagus writhes and rests in the grasp of metal claws, a grinning rotisserie chicken protrudes from a canvas color-drenched in a vibrant green. Two Dallas art collectors, Howard Rachofsky and Thomas Hartland-Mackie, have merged their collections into a joint show and a joint foundation, their acquired works spanning a moat of galleries around the edges of the Warehouse’s cavernous building. In the center are a selection of works by Francesca Mollett; her paintings also adorn the entryways of the core gallery, marking her temporary territory.

There is a sense of intentional chaos in the presentation of these paired exhibitions, Double Vision: The Rachofsky Collection and the Hartland & Mackie / Labora Collection and Francesca Mollett: Elsewhere. Thomas Feulmer and Benjamin Godsill, curators for Rachofsky and Hartland-Mackie, respectively, have orchestrated a coalescence of collections that engages the mind and body, constructing a memory palace that feels at once personal and shared.

Inexplicably, we are welcomed by a Christmas tree. Philippe Parreno’s Fraught Times: For Eleven Months of the Year it’s an Artwork and in December it’s Christmas (July) (2017) embraces not only the kitsch of the holidays, but its inevitable feeling of staleness in the offseason. The shelf life of revelry is so short that the tree’s presence in early spring is evocative: the second-hand anxiety of a chore unfinished, or a holiday carcass not yet buried, is palpable. Kitsch is then immediately abandoned as one enters the next gallery of Double Vision, a tranquil space filled with “Atmospheric Painting,” where large canvases by Howardena Pindell, Anicka Yi, and others engage with a variety of abstract modes to explore landscape and biology. Swaths of dots and tentacular biomorphic forms put the Christmas tree back-of-mind: yes, these are the familiar contents of a museum space. A sense of distance between the self and the works feels safer, an experience that impinges less on one’s internal life.

But the curatorial work is just beginning, preparing to upend our expectations. The two shows on view at the Warehouse, Double Vision and Elsewhere, bring the impact of collaboration to the forefront; these thematically-charged spaces exemplify curator and collector influence on how the public accesses and contextualizes the artist. Rachofsky, Hartland-Mackie, Feulmer, Godsill, and Mollett ensure this installation is not arbitrary, but a recollection plotted across space—a recollection of nature, human behavior, anatomy, innovation, and the ways we make ourselves small and large.

Sixteen galleries flow into one another on the circumference of the Warehouse. While the exhibition’s title Double Vision suggests an ongoing duality of voice and dialog between the collections, the thematic range at play here expands outward together in an artistic multiverse. Galleries are devoted to Marguerite Humeau, to the “Surrealist Sensibility,” to Carroll Dunham and Dana Schutz, to “Science & the Body.” The salt, algae, seaweed, and bone of Humeau’s Kuroshio (2022) evokes the ancient and the spiritual, while in the next gallery lives Hannah Levy’s writhing asparagus (Untitled, 2018). In the back corner of the Warehouse, the confines of the gallery stretch upward toward skylights to accommodate two truly mammoth sculptures, Aaron Curry’s STARFUKER (2015) and Sterling Ruby’s Elliptic Umbilic/Fait Accompli (2007). In the back corner of this back corner is Charles Long’s Buloop, Buloop (1995), a water cooler with corded headphones attached, a la the music stores of days gone by (RIP Sam Goody). Attached to this water jug and transfixed by its folksy bubbling, you are reminded of your own smallness by the large works of aluminum and steel and wood before you.

There is more: a yellow scaffolding of potted plants (Rashid Johnson, High Time, 2020), and scaffolds of DNA (Sean Raspet, “Myofibrillar Tissue Scaffold” series from 2024) and thirty monitors of animals at play (Peter Coffin, Untitled, 2008). These memories have stakes. Echoes of textbooks and unsettling headlines and childhood television programming and lovers and feuds and fantasies invade the brain and body—are you remembering or are you reeling? This prophouse of art and artists—Wade Guyton, Calvin Marcus, Elaine Cameron-Weir, Jim Hodges, Danh Vo, and so many others. Each gallery tilts the narrative on its head, letting us lose ourselves in this one discovery for this one moment before ferrying us along to the next.

In the Warehouse’s center gallery, Francesca Mollett’s Elsewhere is the ultimate “next.” Serving as the museum’s current WAREHOUSE:01 project (an ongoing series of visiting solo exhibitions), Mollett’s abstract oil paintings are confidently in conversation with one another. Their earth tones and intricate brushwork call to the forms of our ancient earth, conjuring geodes and stalactites and cliff faces. They are pulsing and alive and offer cohesion amid the chaos: a gravitational force, holding the entire space and our shifting relation to it together at its core.

In an interview with The Wise Fool Art Podcast from 2022, Feulmer asserted that “putting art in space is a body project, it’s not a research project.” Double Visions is more than a curatorial project for the two collections; it also serves as the inaugural exhibition for Rachofsky and Hartland-Mackie’s new enterprise, the Warehouse Dallas Art Foundation, which maintains the Warehouse’s established interest in public access to global art. When it comes to a merger, it is hard not to get mired down in the attempt to streamline things, sand off rough edges, and avoid conflicting visions; with Double Vision and Elsewhere, Feulmer and Godsill avoided these pitfalls and instead leaned into a kind of collaborative chaos. In this warehouse, they trust the body to hold onto many stories at once.